Bonding Against Austerity: Can States Offset Federal Cuts?

With federal budgets promising austerity, could states help themselves? Ben Wilson and Scott Ferguson are proposing ‘Blue Bonds.’

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Scott Ferguson and Ben Wilson of the Money on the Left collective discuss their ‘Blue Bonds’ proposal with Steve. They explain how states can issue bonds to mitigate the federal austerity measures being enacted under the Trump administration. The conversation explores how this approach could democratize fiscal policy at the sub-federal level and empower local governments.

Their proposal frames state-issued bonds as a democratic tool to counteract federal inefficiencies, foster local investment and engage communities in financial decision-making.

They also address the ideological and practical barriers concerning the public’s grasp of economic sovereignty, stressing the importance of understanding endogenous money creation and challenging the collective fear of public debt.

Benjamin C. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York at Cortland and a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Scott Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida and a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He is co-host of Money on the Left podcast featured by Monthly Review.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT with EXTRAS

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese.

Folks, I haven’t had these two gentlemen on in a while, and the last time we talked about a very similar subject or at least marginally tied together, and that was the UNI. We talked [then] about university currency scrip, an alternative funding mechanism. Really, really exciting conversation.

And these guys, Scott Ferguson and Ben Wilson of the Money on the Left Collective, are joining me again today to discuss a new old concept, a concept that should be tried and true. The difference is this is targeting blue. There I went, rhyming.

And we are focusing on how in the world to backfill the austerity and overcoming a lot of what you’re seeing in Trump 2.0.

We on this program typically look at it from a working-class perspective and trying to help people understand what’s in their best interest and help them see the angles that some of these subjects that are usually over the average rank and file person’s head kind of slips right on past them and they don’t even realize they got hosed. Today’s conversation is going to be on a way to mitigate some of that.

And it’s going to be leveraging a strategy that these two gentlemen ferreted out, using tried and true fiscal strategies for states to overcome the austerity at the federal level. So without further ado, I bring on my guests, Ben Wilson and Scott Ferguson. Welcome to the show.

Ben Wilson:
00:02:11

Great to be here.

Scott Ferguson:
00:02:13

Hey, Steve.

Steve Grumbine:
00:02:14

Dude, you sounded way sexy when you said that. I was like, hey. Hey, Scott. How are you? All right, so you guys wrote a paper called Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0.

The subtext is “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0.” Hey! It’s a double whammy.

But this conversation is really important to me anyway because we frequently talk about everything at the federal level because the currency-issuing national government, the federal government in the United States and whatever currency-issuing entity is the primary, you know, monopoly issuer around the world. But in the US obviously, we talk about the federal government, but this is directing it towards states, in particular blue states.

And I would proffer up to say it could be for red states, too, for red states that are getting jacked around that have finally come to grips with the fact that austerity isn’t all that great.

Scott Ferguson:
00:03:09

Absolutely.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:10

But you guys came up with a pretty interesting strategy using existing tools that many people probably have not really considered, not really thought about. And I’d like to let you guys tell me about your great paper here.

And, folks, just before anybody tries to break out the lynch mob, I’m not simping for Democrats here. This is merely a strategy for trying to get states to figure out a way past austerity, because austerity is murder, as I’ve said countless times.

And at the state level, it’s really becoming quite a problem. These guys did come up with a strategy. So with that, Scott, Ben, I’ll let either one of you choose who wants to go.

Ben Wilson:
00:03:51

Scott, I’ll yield. Let you get things going for us since you’ve got the sexy voice. All right.

Scott Ferguson:
00:03:57

Thanks, Ben.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:58

Don’t sell yourself short, Ben.

Scott Ferguson:
00:04:01

So right after Trump’s inauguration and the seizure of the Treasury and many other federal agencies by Elon Musk and DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency], we at Money on the Left, along with many others, were horrified by what was being reported. All the illegal impoundments, the hijacking and confiscation of our data, and of course, the resulting austerity.

And at Money on the Left, you know, we have a very particular point of view that I think we have a lot in common with Macro N Cheese. Right? We understand money is a public utility and it is not a finite thing that you need to recycle in the economy.

And we were thinking, well, how do we bring our expertise to this problem? How do we respond to this problem? How do we help a potential resistance?

And how do we potentially bring much needed funds that are being mostly illegally cut at the federal level? I have to say, at first, we were thinking in more experimental ways.

We immediately went to complementary currencies, community currencies, creating new or alternative debt instruments. I think some of our conversations had us talking about some of the ideas that Yanis Varoufakis was throwing around with the Greek debt crisis. Right?

That never quite got tried. And as time went on and as the urgency became more intense and the situation felt more and more dire and out of control.

I think there was a sense in our group that, you know what?

We need a strategy that’s going to be immediately intelligible, that we need a strategy that doesn’t begin with, “Okay, so there’s this instrument called a complimentary currency or a parallel currency.

And here’s how it works, and here’s how it might be related to the dollar.” Instead of doing all that, which, you know, would be worth doing anytime really, but in this particular crisis we thought to ourselves, no, let’s try to use language and tools that are immediately intelligible to folks.

And long story short, and we will come back and tell the long story, but the long story short is that what we are proposing is for blue states and municipalities, by which we mean states and municipalities that have majority of democratic leadership in their legislative bodies and potentially blue dots in, in red states or as you pointed out, Steve, maybe even red states who are fed up. But essentially these democratically controlled municipalities and states should issue bonds. Not freaky strange parallel currency bonds, just bonds.

They do so all the time. They can be long term bonds. Usually we just call these “munis”, right, municipal bonds.

And different states have different names for these different instruments that they use, but they also have access to short-term bonds or short-term instruments.

Sometimes these are called “tax anticipation notes” that have to be tied to a particular tax revenue stream and they have to be paid off within a fiscal year.

So why don’t we use long-term bonds, short-term bonds, have a big bond drive for democracy and use the funds that are raised in the process to start repairing and making up for all of these illegal cuts.

Now along the way we thought we have a Federal Reserve that has proven itself historically, especially in the last 10, 15 years, rather adept and really well equipped to buy debt from sub-federal organizations and agencies in the private sector. But also the municipal liquidity facility that was opened up during the pandemic made that possible for public agencies and municipalities.

So we thought, you know what, the Fed can help.

Now we know very well that there is a difference between what is on paper at the Fed and what they’re equipped to do versus the unspoken politics of the situation. But we thought let’s put some pressure on the Federal Reserve. Now, whether the Fed helps or not, and of course they most likely won’t.

But you know what, if we got millions of Americans marching in the street to make them do it, maybe they would. But let’s say they’re not going to help. That’s fine. This plan does not rely on the Fed in any kind of intrinsic way.

And we then connected this up to what has been, for better or for worse, over a decade worth of Democratic Party record-breaking fundraising. So the Harris campaign, whether you loved it or hated it, it made more money than any other Democratic party campaign in history.

Both the rich and small dollar donators were very excited about investing in, you could say democracy or let’s say the prevention of tyranny or the prevention of fascism.

And so we thought, why not have a bond drive that picks up on that spirit and that track record of both institutional investors and rich people, but also everyday people who want to invest in democracy.

And in this case, they can invest in democracy in ways that will actually produce fiscal spending rather than investing in the possibility of democracy by buying a bunch of television commercials on legacy media that aren’t really doing much. Right? So why not tap into this energy and really have a big bond drive?

I think for a while we liked the analogy of what we were doing back when we were more thinking about parallel currencies. We were thinking about the analogy of the greenback, like Lincoln’s greenback.

Lincoln’s greenback was created to keep the union intact and it was to overcome slavery. And even if Lincoln’s government still had racism in it, it nevertheless was on the side, at least anti-slavery. Right? [Right.]

So we were going for that and we wanted to stay away from like the World War II war bonds thing. But I don’t know. Now I’m open to it because I think to be honest, that’s like really legible to people. So let’s have a, “We sold war bonds to go beat Hitler, let’s sell blue bonds to go beat Trumpism [campaign].”

So that’s the idea. There are a lot of devils in the details. Happy to open them up and then I think I’ll stop talking after I say one more thing.

We are approaching this from what we consider to be an advanced MMT, public endogenous money framework. But we are packaging it in a everyday, everybody gets it.

Yes, money is a finite private thing that is just recycled and governments have to tax or borrow before they can spend. So for us, the bond is. It’s more like a vehicle or it’s. It’s. I don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse, but it’s a way to package what we’re proposing.

But we see what we’re doing not in the conventional way.

We actually do not think that technically what is happening is that the private sector is lending to the public sector and then the public sector is on the hook for all these interest payments because we don’t think it works that way.

But in order to explain that, we’ll have to talk about maybe some of the subtle differences between what we sometimes at Money on the Left call “MMT101” and our approach, which essentially radicalizes the possibilities of endogenous money theory to the sub-federal level. But I’ll stop there. I don’t know if Ben wants to add or if we want to take follow up questions.

Steve Grumbine:
00:11:55

Let me ask one quick question. You said a couple important things. I took notes here and one of the notes was you made mention of impoundment.

Now, I know what you’re talking about there, but I don’t know that everybody understands that. Can you talk about some of the details that Trump has done or the Republican Congress has done, AKA this strategy of austerity?

What, what have they done? What has Trump done? What has DOGE done that has created the conditions here that we’re describing? Empowerment in particular.

Scott Ferguson:
00:12:27

Ben, you want to take that?

Ben Wilson:
00:12:28

Sure. I think one of the…

And this is connected to what Scott was saying at the end in terms of using this as a way of introducing a common language and to move forward with changing the way that public financing works in a much broader way than it has in the past several decades. Over the last two months, or however long it’s been, the mainstream media has said “congressional appropriation” probably 10 million times.

And how many times did we hear them talk about congressional appropriations in the decades previous? The idea that money was being created by Congress was completely foreign.

And now it’s been made legible by the Trump administration as legislation was passed and money was appropriated that should be spent and hit the balance sheets of various agencies like USAID and it’s been halted by the executive branch illegally. This is the impoundment terminology.

My initial thinking was that this money was created and so we could collateralize any of these instruments by these dollars that were already there. Right?

It’s only a matter of lawsuits and time before this is deemed unconstitutional and those dollars are returned to the states or the agencies, etc. As a stopgap, we shouldn’t be allowing people to be suffering the austerity and the illegal actions of the Trump administration.

We should be creative and we should be allowing those funds and those investments to flow so that people aren’t hungry and sacrificing medical care and missing mortgage payments and doing all the things that destroy the economy at the macro level.

So impoundment is essentially the executive branch not following through on its congressional mandate to spend funds that were created by Congress into existence.

Steve Grumbine:
00:14:20

Is there not legal precedent going back to the 70s even, and I may be getting this wrong, but isn’t there something out there that says they made it illegal for them to do impoundment, period? The President didn’t get the line-item veto. They, they attacked Nixon for doing this.

It wasn’t there a law passed that basically said, “You can’t do that?”

Ben Wilson:
00:14:41

Yeah, you’ll have to get a legal scholar on to speak to that. Over the last several years, I’ve gotten an increasingly interdisciplinary and an increasingly humanities focus.

And a friend of mine used to joke that I’ve become a jack of all trades and a master of none.

Steve Grumbine:
00:14:58

I’m being guilty here. I literally looked it up to make sure I wasn’t lying here.

Ben Wilson:
00:15:02

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:15:03

I think it was called the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, enacted to limit the power of the President to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, reasserting Congress’s authority over the budget. And I guess that goes back to Constitution Article 1, Section 8. That’s what I’m guessing.

Ben Wilson:
00:15:18

Yeah.

Scott Ferguson:
00:15:19

So, bottom line, yes, you’re right. This is illegal. And this is one of the reasons. There’s many reasons we are in the midst of a fiery constitutional crisis,
you know, but this is one of them.

The fake agency that is DOGE taking over the treasury and the {Bureau of the} Fiscal Service, which is a choke point for fiscal spending at the federal level and just deciding line-item vetoing without any accountability. Of course it’s illegal, but so many things that the Trump administration is doing is illegal, and it’s atrocious.

Steve Grumbine:
00:15:52

Yeah.

Ben Wilson:
00:15:53

You know, it’s one of the limitations of sovereignty. Right? I mean, this has always been, in the back of our minds is a fear. Right?

That the power of the purse and the taking of control by a fascist regime wielding the power of the dollar in ways that are doing evil has always been something that has been terrifying.

So the Blue Bond strategy is really trying to find ways to democratize the power of money creation in new and creative ways and to get more people to ask questions about what is legal and why isn’t it legal, and to start sorting out democratically the design of a currency system that we want that would be resilient, that would be able to deliver healthcare, environmental sustainability, resilience against fascist tendencies.

And the current limitations of the Constitution and our structure of monetary design are really being pushed in ways that are extremely dangerous and scary to all of us. And that really calls us to action and to introducing these concepts and thinking about them in very different ways.

Scott Ferguson:
00:17:02

I should say that if listeners out there are interested in the legal details and history of this unconstitutional impoundment, a), obviously follow Nathan Tankus, which I’m sure most of you are already doing, [and] b), tune into the recent Money on the Left episode with Rohan Grey, where we talk about his recent law review paper, Digitizing the Fisc, in which he not only diagnoses the illegality behind these DOGE actions, but also proposes an entirely new, more robust, more resilient and more democratic fiscal payment infrastructure that will not make itself vulnerable to appropriation by one branch and especially an executive that is being propelled by a right-wing unitary executive theory of power.

Steve Grumbine:
00:17:54

I appreciate that. Both of those gentlemen I follow. One question for you real quickly as we’re looking at this. You know, I always think of MMT as the base case of fiat currency.

And then you slag on the fiscal rules and the structural design of the payment system and all that stuff. And now you have a secondary layer to the base case.

If you’re buying a car and it just says, “Hey, here’s a stripped-down model. Doesn’t come with air conditioning. Doesn’t come with the wheels you want. It doesn’t come with the high-end stick shift or whatever it is. Doesn’t come with all the things that you want. You get to build them.

And so as you talk about designing the monetary system, a fiat system’s the base case here we’re talking by decree.

There’s an authority that has the power to issue currency, and there’s a power that has the ability to implement some form of tax or some sort of liability that maintains the power of that currency.

But as you talk about layering these rules and these structural angles that take into account class struggle or take into account design and democracy and things like that, those fiscal rules or those rules in general for the system and how it operates and what you can do and what you can’t do, kind of like a bank charter. This is what you can do, this is what you can’t do, or whatever. Is that what we’re talking about?

Before we even dive into the particulars of Blue Bonds, I just want to make sure a lot of people jump to political economy before they understand the base structure, before they understand the plumbing. And I think that you can get into a lot of trouble bypassing that because a lot of great ideas can’t be done because of the current design.

Scott Ferguson:
00:19:37

Indeed, and that’s a great question. This will be my opportunity to start to introduce this distinction between MMT101 and the Money on the Left approach.

Again, they’re not opposed, but they are a little bit different.

The MMT 101 story, as we know, starts with a sovereign who usually has a monopoly on violence and then imposes a tax or a tax fee fine structure on a population that creates demand for the currency. We’ve all heard this, we’ve all said this, we know how this works, right?

And then part of the 101 story is also that, well, the currency issuer is the sovereign and can have different degrees of sovereignty and power. And then everyone else is a mere user. And that includes states, municipalities, at least when we’re talking about the United States.

Obviously they’re called different things in different places. But sub-national, sub-federal governments become mere users of a currency.

So what this does is, is that it renders sub-federal government largely powerless. And it says that all you can do is recycle the money that’s out there. Us at Money on the Left, we reject this division.

It’s not to say that we don’t reject the idea that there is a large federal government that does have a good majority of power. We don’t reject that. But we reject the hard binary between the issuer and the user, especially when it comes to sub-federal government.

And also what we do is we remember a key element of MMT that ends up for us contradicting the 101 story about sovereignty. So the key element is the endogenous money elements, right? What is the endogenous theory of money?

The endogenous theory of money is that money is credit or it’s a credit/debt relationship. It’s created out of thin air all the time. We have Minsky’s famous phrase that I’m sure all your listeners have heard in one form or another.

“Anybody can create credit. The trick is to get it accepted,” right? And the part that’s not said in that idiom is what does it take to get it accepted?

It takes power. It takes legibility. It takes authority. It takes the stakeholders of society to make it legitimate. Otherwise, it’s just Steve’s IOU, right? But if the state of California makes Steve’s IOU tax receivable, then suddenly you’re doing it.

So if all money is endogenous, that means that no money is a finite thing that gets recycled. Banks create money out of thin air. The federal government creates money out of thin air.

And quite frankly, whenever we are dealing with monetary transactions in our economy, which is everything, money is constantly being created and destroyed all the time. So for us at Money on the Left, we say, “Let’s not play the recycling game for sub-federal entities either.”

Which is not to say that we should treat California as the same as the United States government. Obviously, California has slightly different powers, right?

They can’t do what the federal government does but that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t create credit. Now for us in let’s say non-absolute crisis times, you could argue that we’ve been in crisis for all of modernity, right?

But we can say that it’s a little bit more acute right now, right? Or a lot more acute right now. In non-crisis times, I would say our end goal is to democratize the finance franchise, right?

To create public entities that are democratic, that might be states and municipalities, but it might also be other forms that we create, right?

That involve all kinds of interesting democratic experiments and bottom-up participation that transforms the way that credit is created at the local level. That’s what we want ultimately. But what this does is that it says, “Okay look, you public, you Americans, now you know what a bond is, right? So let’s just sell bonds and finance the resistance.”

But for us, what state bonds are, it’s just creating credit, right? And MMT101 will say that when the federal government appropriates funds and then sells some treasury bonds, that’s not really borrowing. We say that too about the sub-federal level. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues to deal with like interest payments and the like.

And we can talk about that. But that’s I think the fundamental kind of shift that the Money on the Left project has enacted.

We really want to think about, let’s unleash the powers of public endogenous money across all scales and stop talking about how, well, except for the sovereign who’s got the biggest dick with unending power coming out the tip of it, and all the rest of us are screwed, right?

Instead of proceeding in that way, we’re saying “No, this is a politic of design. And if we want to have a working-class politics of design, then we’ve got to design the money differently.

We can’t just accept that the baseline is that there’s one big dick and we all have to bow down.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:25:05

That’s one way.

Scott Ferguson:
00:25:06

You’re welcome.

Steve Grumbine:
00:25:07

I love it! Yeah, if they do it, I owe you. Hey guys, rack it, that’s the headliner. Put that out there. Now I want to jump in on this real quickly
and then Ben, I want to hear from you. I think about this all the time because obviously many of us feel, most of us feel, especially lefties feel that we have no real advocate, right?

Everybody is advocating for corporate rights, for corporate freedom, but people are often left languishing off to the side.

And so you’ve got all these well-meaning groups cropping up that don’t understand the basics of economics and are living in a neoliberal world where they are fundamentally once again doing the whole, “We’ll raise taxes on these people to pay for these things.” And what you see in the United States, this ridiculous race to the bottom where the states are literally in a dog-eat-dog battle against each other.

And you see Texas winning this frequently where they say, “Hey, we got no taxes down here. Come on down to Texas. We’re open for business.” And companies leave up north where they are, “Hey, we’re going to tax the corporations so that we can pay for schools.”

And all of a sudden corporations say, “Not me, you ain’t.” And then they go down to Texas or some other state that doesn’t have those taxes or they get negative taxes or sweetheart deals or whatever.

And so these states are battling.

And you look at the CAFR reports [Comprehensive Annual Financial Report] of these states, a lot of these states don’t have enough money to pay their pensions, don’t have enough money to pay for even a mild real disruption for their income flow that could have real serious implications downstream to employment and just quality of life in general. How do you democratize that? And you’re seeing democratizing credit, not necessarily the US dollar.

So help me understand that, and do me a favor, walk me through the forest like a small child here. Help me understand that.

Ben Wilson:
00:27:02

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s been the heart of my academic career.

One of the things that’s really always been in the back of my mind since taking my early studies at [University of Missouri – Kansas City] UMKC is what are the jobs that the jobs guarantee is going to deliver? Right? How do we make those decisions about what those jobs are and what sort of work do we want to do?

And all of those sorts of questions really demand a robust and an intelligible democracy in a way for people to make collective decisions. And at the federal level, right, we see how dysfunctional that is.

So by disaggregating these decisions to smaller levels of decision making, I think we’re building a practice and a learning by doing pedagogy for allowing people to actually see how public money can operate and breaking public money from the zero-sum logics of the taxpayer rhetoric. The UNI, I think, is at the heart and center of this for me.

Teaching students through currency issuance in the classroom and having them mobilize resources in their communities, both in Cortland and at home and Long Island and other places that students go over their breaks to feed the homeless or to distribute clothing or to do Habitat for Humanities projects. They begin to see the power of public money and creation and the work that it creates in new and different ways.

And I think the Blue Bond and its language and the idea of you’re investing in democracy and you’re seeing your money not go to campaign contributions, but to direct fiscal investments and development are akin to that sort of project, right? To think about what it is that we want our money to do and what we collectively want to come together, to promise, to deliver for one another.

And so that’s why I think this is an exciting space for opening those conversations in ways that I think people feel a little comfortable. And if the limitations of the bond are things like states can’t run deficits, then the next step is to talk about why they can’t.

What laws need to be changed in order to make that possible.

Maybe instead of it being direct fiscal spending, you know, this is the avenue where we create public banks and public banks have different missions and balance sheets and responsibilities and stewardship to the community.

It just the more that we can think about the institutions that both limit and make visible the way that we can mobilize resources for ourselves at a time where they desperately need to be mobilized in the face of a climate crisis, to name one, an inequality and democracy crisis, to name another, the better off we’ll be.

And so your work here on this show and Money on the Left, I think, are really consistent pedagogical instruments for getting people to have those conversations and to think about how they can make change in their communities and their neighborhoods, in their city governments, in their state governments.

Because I think these spaces, I think a Democrat in city council on Ithaca has a very different viewpoint or is at least controlled by very different money interests than a Democrat in Congress.

And so maybe those decisions and those discussions go further and we’re able to lead by positive example and success that allows for more freedom to occur at these community and more local levels for public provisioning.

Steve Grumbine:
00:30:38

That’s well said. Scott, your thoughts?

Scott Ferguson:
00:30:40

Yeah, I just want to speak to another part of your question. You said that we all are talking about credit and we’re not talking about the US Dollar.

And my response to that is “No, we’re talking about the US Dollar, which is credit. But it gets complicated. It also gets ideological real quick.” Right?

Again, because of this particular emergency, we decided, let’s propose a bond drive. Bonds: They’re priced in the US Dollar. They are part of the dollar system. There is no question. We’re not calling them something else.

We’re not calling them greenbacks, part two or whatever. We’re not saying they’re a totally different currency or they’re just a parallel currency. We could have, but we decided not to.

So in this case, it is part of the dollar system.

On the other hand, right, when we’re talking about different levels of credit issuance, like in the classroom or just on one university campus, then, yeah, I guess we’re talking about not necessarily the US dollar, but for us, the relationship between the US dollar and various forms of credit is much more intertwined and interdependent than we usually think about it being.

For example, we talk about all these lower, less powerful forms of credit like airline miles and gift cards and things like that. How do we price them? We price them in the dollar, right? They’re part of the dollar system. They don’t have a great degree of liquidity, right?

They’re, once you buy a Starbucks gift card for your kid’s teacher for Christmas or whatever, they can’t get that redeemed at another coffee shop. They can’t go to the corner store and spend it, but they can spend it in lots and lots of Starbucks around the world. Is that a dollar or is it not?

I think for most Americans, I think they would say, “Yeah, sure, it’s just. It’s just a dollar stored with Starbucks, right?”

So if we have dollars that are stored with Starbucks, why can’t we have dollars that are created all the time by radically democratic local neighborhood council that provisions according to the needs, desires and demands of the community?

Steve Grumbine:
00:33:00

Interesting. I’m trying to mentally wrap my head around issuance still, like you’re issuing a token of sorts.

And I don’t want to get too far down that rabbit hole because that’s not exactly where we’re at here with the bonds, okay? So we’re making a claim on a,
and I always butcher this, but like an endogenous dollar creation, we’re making a claim on that at a credit level by another token.

And it’s up to the currency issuer to put more tokens into the pot because we’re making a play on that using a different form of credit that draws on that issuance of other dollars. Am I totally boogering that up?

Scott Ferguson:
00:33:40

No. But I guess what I would want to point out is that the dollar is not even a homogenous substance in the first place. It’s not like the currency issuer creates the dollar and there’s just the dollar. And it’s, to use a horrible term, it’s gold, right?

Like it’s gold and everything else is copper, and you can issue copper tokens, but at the end of the day, everybody’s going to want the gold. I don’t think it’s that stark. And in fact, what is the dollar? The dollar is Fed notes.

The dollar is a shit ton of balance sheets across the entire economy. The dollar is treasury bonds. The dollar is municipal bonds. The dollar is airline miles, and the dollar is Target gift cards.

It’s a whole interdependent hierarchy. And this is MMT101. It’s an interdependent hierarchy, but it’s heterogeneous. There isn’t just one dollar, right?

So the question is, what kind of power, what kind of excitement, what kind of political and popular participation is going into these forms of credit?

Steve Grumbine:
00:34:45

So I’m going to take MMT101 and try to advance what you’re saying here into my understanding, and then you can back me out and deprogram me a little bit.

Scott Ferguson:
00:34:54

Okay.

Steve Grumbine:
00:34:55

As you’re talking about building these Blue Bonds, and for the purposes of just structurally thinking about it, think of them as state bonds.

For anybody listening that may be in a red state and doesn’t want to think about blues, or maybe they’re in a purple state and doesn’t want to think about blues, or maybe you’re somewhere else. Just think about it as someone else issuing bonds.

So what you’re doing is you’re selling a bond which serves as a de facto tax, except the difference is, unlike taxes, which we pay and we don’t really get back, we should conceivably get some form of services or whatever from that tax. But in the case of the bond, you’re getting some form of interest payment back. Correct?

A person buys a Blue Bond, they would have a rate of return that they would be expecting. This is an investment for them.

Scott Ferguson:
00:35:40

Sure.

Steve Grumbine:
00:35:41

Okay.

And so the idea, though, is that then the state or municipal area would then take the principal of those bonds, the initial investment, and use that to finance whatever it is that they’re attempting to finance while simultaneously paying back a certain fee to the bond holder. How does that process work? I know we do it already, but just for the sake of understanding the structure, how does that portion work?

Ben Wilson:
00:36:09

Ben, didn’t you just describe exactly how that works?

Steve Grumbine:
00:36:13

Hold on. So where does the interest come from? I assume you’re not paying them back in cherries and whistles. You’re paying them back in US Dollars.

So is that from tax receipts? Is that from other people’s bond holdings?

You’re just keeping a pool of money to pay interest payments or is this where you’re entering the Fed into the mix? If I miss this, if you said it, I’m an idiot and I accept that.

Ben Wilson:
00:36:35

No, it would just be from the same way that they would pay back any other municipal bond. [They do it all the time] You know, the Fed, I don’t think the Fed would need to come in any sort of way until these assets became distressed.

Steve Grumbine:
00:36:48

Interesting. Okay.

Ben Wilson:
00:36:49

So the municipal liquidity facility is there and available.

And if cities and states weren’t able to make payments and these started to become distressed assets or toxic as mortgage-backed securities, then we could sell them to the Fed and put them on their balance sheets and relieve those anxieties. But the other space, right, too is that we’ve recouped all these dollars by selling these bonds.

And then the courts come down on the side of the Constitution and all of these dollars are released to the states. Right? Then you’ve got the opposite of the liquidity crisis. Right? There’s really no problem in paying back the bonds and doing more fiscal expansion.

And so. Yeah, does that answer your question? I mean…

Steve Grumbine:
00:37:38

It does. This is just random municipal-state bond, you’re just calling it “Blue Bond.” So there’s really no functional difference.

Scott Ferguson:
00:37:43

Okay.

Steve Grumbine:
00:37:44

We’re tracking.

Intermission:
00:37:46

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Scott Ferguson:
00:38:09

I want to add something to this.

Steve Grumbine:
00:38:10

Sure.

Scott Ferguson:
00:38:11

So what is crucial here is getting over our collective terror around sub-federal debt. Of course, we’re always going after the collective terror around federal debt, but now we’re saying this is nothing to be afraid of, right?

Just a few weeks ago there was some news report that said that, “Whatever this means, right, whatever the metrics are that they used to make these proclamations, take it all with a grain of salt.” But nevertheless, there was this report that California is officially the fourth largest economy in the world. Right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:38:47

In the world.

Scott Ferguson:
00:38:48

Larger than countries. And who knows if that’s true or false or whatever, what metrics they use. The point is that it’s a powerful productive economy, right?

So why would the supposedly fourth largest economy in the world have to worry about its debt issuance? So for us, this is an emergency measure.

What we want to do is just legally give California, legally give municipalities the finance franchise so they don’t have to play this kind of debt-financing shell game.

But if we’re talking about just a few years, there’s really, and quite frankly, I would say even in perpetuity, there’s no law of nature that says that California can’t be in deficit and in debt forever. And in fact we looked it up. It’s illegal for states, municipalities. There is no legal channel to force a state into bankruptcy.

Sub-state municipalities can go bankrupt and they can be forced into bankruptcy. So that’s the law. And so there’s an opening there.

And then just as a matter of principle, the only reason to be afraid of California or New York or Los Angeles being overly indebted and servicing all these interest payments and then issuing more Blue Bonds to pay for them or hey, taxing the rich in the state a little bit more to pay for them. The only obstacle is just this ideological terror which is ill-conceived on our part.

Steve Grumbine:
00:40:21

I think I’m beginning to really understand. One of the questions I have for you, and you may have started addressing this already too, Ben, so just let me put that out there.

This cross-state solidarity network that you guys put out in your press release, I think that’s really interesting.

Like obviously California is this massive economy, but then you look over at some of the other smaller blue states, even red states just keep it real. Any state. Let’s just make this for the sake of conversation. It’s not just a red or blue thing.

We’re turning this into a sub-federal democratic pool ability to do great things in spite of federal idiocy. Could these states not create a pool between themselves and create cross-state kind of coalitions?

I don’t know if that’s the right way of framing this, but [absolutely]

Ben Wilson:
00:41:10

Yeah. I think that that’s right.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:11

Okay.

Ben Wilson:
00:41:12

I mean, I think the Big Ten is a good example with Rutgers leading the way of trying to get universities to sign on in collective solidarity to protect themselves. There’s just no reason not to be breaking down all of these individualism barriers that we’ve falsely put up in the mode of neoliberal thinking.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:32

Love it.

Ben Wilson:
00:41:33

Juntos podemos.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:34

No, that’s fantastic.

And the other thing that I wanted to say, and I think that you guys have already addressed this at some level, but for me, I think the thing that jumped out the most is that under the current framework, the federal government has a greater ceiling than the bank and yet at the same time the bank has a greater ceiling than the state.

Scott Ferguson:
00:41:54

Which is insane.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:57

Yes, that doesn’t seem right.

Ben Wilson:
00:42:00

Yeah, this is how we’re getting infinite investment in AI and the destruction of clean water and energy. When we limit our focus on what sort of resources can be mobilized around the profit motive, this is the problem that we put ourselves in, right?

So this is an opportunity to reframe that, to rethink what it is that we really want to be investing in, what we really want collectively in order to make our lives secure and stable and happy and productive and dignified and all of those things. Leaving the banks at a higher order of decision making for mobilization of resources is an extremely dangerous position to be in.

Steve Grumbine:
00:42:40

I’ve never thought of it like that, by the way. I’ve thought about it, but he never put it together quite this way. Go ahead, Scott. I’m sorry.

Scott Ferguson:
00:42:47

Well, I’m glad you brought up the private banking system and private finance because is, let’s think about, you know, what most people are calling the AI bubble, right? What is the AI bubble? It’s an overextension.

It’s investing trillions of dollars in this technology that is for the most part pretty antisocial and ecocidal. And yet you could say that not just Silicon Valley, but you know, our universities, like everyone is over leveraged in this.

And what’s going to happen is that, you know, the so-called bubble, I don’t love these metaphors, but the bubble will pop or it’ll dither away and you know, we’ll shift to the next exciting new thing to overinvest in. But this is just called the investment cycle, right? Or the market cycle. And it’s somehow natural and it’s fine.

No one is bringing the kind of terror that is brought to sub-federal governments to this investment cycle, right.

Even though we kind of all know it’s not going to go on forever and there’s going to have to be all kinds of changes and shifts and deleveraging and blah blah, blah, blah. And yet the AI revolution continues, right? Things are being provisioned and a lot of terrible things are being provisioned.

So why don’t we extend the same kind of grace, the same kind of latitude to our municipalities to fight fascism? If you’ve got an idea to provision community and environments in a way that’s going to be genuinely generative.

If you’ve got great ideas, we’re not here to stop you. Let’s get as democratic and radical and eco-friendly as possible.

But this particular proposal is just, come on, like let’s do the minimum of just fighting back against these cuts and then seeing where we can take it from there.

Ben Wilson:
00:44:42

What would be a democracy bubble?

Scott Ferguson:
00:44:44

Yeah, the democracy bubble. Oh, did the democracy bubble pop?

Steve Grumbine:
00:44:47

Wait till it bursts.

Ben Wilson:
00:44:48

Yeah, the environment bubble.

Scott Ferguson:
00:44:51

Yeah, exactly.

Ben Wilson:
00:44:52

Resilience bubble. It’s over.

Scott Ferguson:
00:44:53

Yeah.

Ben Wilson:
00:44:54

Oh, look.

Scott Ferguson:
00:44:55

California and New York and Illinois did Blue Bonds for a couple years and things were really great, but then it all fell apart.

Ben Wilson:
00:45:02

I mean, they ended homelessness. What to do next?

Scott Ferguson:
00:45:06

Yeah, ended homelessness, but at what cost, right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:45:11

That’s fantastic. I love you guys. All right, so let’s get back to this one issue that I’m struggle busting with here. We obviously know that there are fiscal rules.

We know that there are all these “rules and laws.” Article 1, Section 8 gives power of the purse and taxation to Congress.

Article 1, Section 10, I believe, goes the next step, which denies states the ability to do the same thing. Ben, you eloquently said, “Hey, dude, I ain’t a lawyer”, but how do we get to that level of understanding the fiscal rules?

I mean, these rules that are in place have us hamstrung. I mean, poor Joe Biden got tripped up by the parliamentarians. So let’s not forget how easy it is to trip up a politician.

But at the state and local level, I feel like getting the idea of people to just understand that the US government can’t go broke unless it politically chooses to do so. Right? It literally cannot, but unless it chooses to. Right?

Scott Ferguson:
00:46:09

And we’re saying legally right now, that’s the case for states, not for municipalities.

Steve Grumbine:
00:46:14

But that could be real in every brain that understands MMT and so forth. But for the average person, and I’m going to ask you to talk to me a little bit about the Democratic take rate.

But what I’ve seen is a lot of people wear their red, white and blue pork pie hat, come out with their banners come election time, stomping their feet, out moving their elbows, blowing the whistles and cheering on random neoliberal candidates. And when you say something that didn’t come from the canonical text of the Democratic Party, they ignore you.

And it has been my experience over the last 15 years of being an MMT activist that they are almost harder to reach with these messages, weirdly, than even Republicans, which is just terrifyingly shocking to me. What do you suppose is the ideological predilection of Democrats to just ignore this stuff? It feels like they genuinely don’t want to hear it.

It’s not good enough to hear it from Bernie.

Well, maybe for Bernie-crats it might be, but for the average person, if they don’t hear it from Kamala or they don’t hear it from Pete Buttigieg, then it’s not real. It didn’t happen.

This weird appeal to the party authority for their marching orders seems almost so completely captured, like an institutionalized arrangement where they can’t hear anybody’s conversation unless it was told to them by a politician or somebody within the party. How do you crack that egg? Because it seems impenetrable to me.

Ben Wilson:
00:47:44

Yeah, that’s pretty tough. But I think the classroom space has been very successful in getting students and young people to think about that.

I think there’s a couple of things to this like egg, as you put it, I think part of it is just the bandwidth of whether or not people have a way of thinking about how things can be better.

I guess social media has just fractured our attention so badly that it’s very hard for people to think deeply and critically about just about everything.

And so I think the Blue Bond strategy is a positive one in that this would be something that people would actually be taking a part of it, instead of just giving dollars in an email to whatever campaign. Right? The dollars would be directly going to something that they see in action in their daily life.

And I think that’s how it connects to the UNI and other pedagogical tools.

So if we can bring these sorts of understandings of money to a day-to-day routine sort of level, then it becomes much easier to see and to imagine the power of extending this further. Does that make sense?

Steve Grumbine:
00:48:55

Fair. No, it does.

We’ve started marching down a path trying to reach socialists because everyone we talk to is just like, “I have no interest in MMT. That’s just capitalism.” And you start listening to the nonsense and it’s like, God, to distinguish a socialist or a communist or eco-socialist from Margaret Thatcher is almost impossible.

It’s like their entire worldview is based on taxpayer dollars.

And yeah, I know this is fundamental to the whole MMT 101 story, but it permeates in all these expansions. And you think about like public banking, which has been a weird word in the MMT space.

Cause I know some have a differing view because of the Moslerisms where it’s, “We already have public banks, they’ve just been bastardized through crappy legislation,” whatever. In reality there’s a fundamental disconnect even with the Ellen Brown side where they fundamentally don’t understand public debt.

Merging these two ideas and bringing about state power to do these things feels like Herculean. And I do agree with what you said Ben, that the bond strategy is like just unlocking the door.

Maybe not even opening the door, but just unlocking a door with terminology and framing that is consistent with what they already kind of know and allowing them to dream a different dream through existing synapses in their brain. They don’t have to rewire a million thoughts to come up with some different outcomes.

I’ll throw it over to you, Ben, first, but then I want to hear from Scott.

Ben Wilson:
00:50:26

Yeah, so I’m taking a look at a book called The Activist Humanist: [Form and Method in the Climate Crisis] by Caroline Levine that is putting forth this idea that there are certain structures in society that we assumed are conservative and should be abandoned. And I feel like money fits into this sort of narrative. So routine is one of the examples she gives. Right?

Your routine, like, shuts off your brain, so you’re no longer really critically thinking, and it’s a way of taking away your power and those sorts of things. But routine also allows our minds to wander, to come up with great ideas.

Mowing the lawn for me is a routine activity that I think really helps me get over writer’s block a lot of times. Another structure she points to is pathways. Right? If you stay on the path that you’re on, you’re not deviating. You’re not thinking. Right?

There’s certain conservative logics to that. And she uses, like oil pipelines is an example of a conservative bad pipeline.

But we could easily reimagine those pipelines as delivering fresh and clean water to people. And the last thing that she points out in this book is something that we’ve dismissed as inherently conservative and bad is enclosures.

And enclosures are including things like housing. Right? I was just in the Amazon, and I was very glad to have a roof over my head on a number of those occasions down there.

So reimagining routine pathway and enclosures as spaces of abundance and progressive politics, I think is the same as what we’re trying to do with money and balance sheets and the design of currency systems.

I think socialists and communists and anarchists, and we get over[ly] critical or dismissive of things that are part of our everyday lives, that if we rethink how they work and the logics behind them, we can reorganize those tools in really different ways. So maybe someday we will have this utopian moneyless society, but I think to get there, we’ve got to change the way that money works.

It’s not like it’s the end of Graeber’s book with that Jubilee doesn’t really end any of the existing structures that got people indebted in the first place. Right? That was one of the big critiques on our part of that ending. Books like [Cory] Doctorow’s The Lost Cause, where you’re starting to think through different forms of money in a blue hat, jobs guarantee, or Kim Stanley Robinson, I think was mentioned earlier. Right? Thinking about carbon sequestration as mode for issuing credit. Right?

Reimagining money as something different and breaking people out of the unthinking routine of just swiping their credit card and not really thinking about where that credit came from or where that the decision was made that that’s the way that they should have access to it.

Breaking those routines, breaking down these pathways, creating new ones and establishing new public domains through creative public provisioning, I think is, it’s a hard thing to do, but I think once we start to imagine these structures in different ways, they become a lot less repressive.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:33

I appreciate that. Scott, your thoughts?

Scott Ferguson:
00:53:36

Okay.

First, I just want to, at the risk of being too repetitive, I want to say that this Blue Bond strategy is pointed. It is specific to this particular situation. We were not thinking about the great Blue Bond Strategy before Trump 2.0, before DOGE started doing its shenanigans.

However, this moment ends up passing, and however tragic it is, I’m not sure that we’re going to hold on to Blue Bonds.

This is really thinking with the fundamentals of public endogenous money and thinking about ideology and intelligibility and trying to come up with something that can speak to the present moment. Now, I will say we absolutely share your frustration about the Democratic Party.

We certainly don’t have any magic bullets or, you know, elixirs that we could pass out and everyone can drink and suddenly all those problems are going to go away. Yeah. What can I say? Fight the fight. It’s a long game. There’s short-term strategies, there’s long-term strategies.

We have to keep teaching, keep fighting, keep thinking, keep coming up with new strategies. So what can I say? That’s just political commitment. There’s nothing very. Yeah. It’s just hard. Right? It’s just an uphill battle.

That said, one lesson that the Democrats–and it’s a tricky lesson to learn–but one lesson that the Democrats can learn is that one of the appeals of Trump, he’s a despicable human being.

But I think one of the many reasons why he’s captured a certain kind of popular imagination is the fact that he is at least perceived to say whatever he wants.

He’ll just say whatever comes to his head and he’ll swerve and he’ll meander and he’ll say ridiculous things, and sometimes he says things that are kind of MMT adjacent. “Yeah, I got news for you. We print the money, right?” He’s kind of a monkey at a typewriter, just banging out anything.

And I think that there is something exciting about the possibility of a major stakeholder in our society doing that precisely because of decades and decades of neoliberal ideology and the stranglehold of these parties and the narrow lane of discourse that is permitted. So even if he’s saying vile things, and this is not an apology for him. [sure] He’s my worst enemy.

But even though he says absurd and vile things, he is willing to not play by these official rules. Now, this is really tricky, right, because it’s not like we want to embrace, like, “Yeah, let’s just say anything.

Vaccines cause autism,” and we don’t want to just open up discourse to anything goes. Right?

But I think Trump couldn’t be Trump if it wasn’t for the official ideology and party discourses and discipline that came before him that he provides a kind of relief to. And I think it’s no accident that in 2016, we had a moment that kind of felt like it was potentially Bernie versus Trump.

And I think some of the same people liked them both. And to be honest, this played out in the most recent election.

AOC did a poll among the people who voted for her and voted for Trump, which feels like crazy, right? And they said, “Well, I like both of you because you both speak your mind.”

You know, maybe, Steve, you don’t agree that AOC speaks her mind, and maybe you think she’s a party hack or whatever, but the point stands, right?

There’s a perception that the parties, and especially the Democrats, don’t have the ability to actually talk about the world in ways that are free and open and potentially liberating. That’s the lesson that the party has to learn, or else I think that they’re going to continue to lose.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:36

Yeah. I can tell you this right now. I never have supported Trump, but I also am extremely harsh on the pseudo-opposition, as I call it.

One of the things that you said that really gave me a bit of an epiphany. I really despise people that carefully think about what they’re going to say, carefully think about who they’re going to associate with.

Carefully think about walling off gardens and stuff like that. And the Democratic Party has been stale to the point of absurdity, where they literally have locked down.

“Here’s what’s the acceptable words, we’ll say.” And you can see it by the tweet storms that come out from their operatives, okay?

And people that are really struggling, right, like whether you like the deplorables or not, whether you like progressives that aren’t locking step with the Hillary’s of the world, they’re tired of it too. They’re tired of this one degree of discourse out of the other 359 degrees that nobody looks at. And tired of, some would call it “message discipline.”

I would call it fraudulent, absolute veneer-level nonsense carefully architected. And people are looking for people that say, “You know, I got a feeling it’s going to rain today.

I’m looking up at the trees and the leaves are turned up. It must be rain coming.” Right? They want to be able to feel like everything isn’t a carefully focused, group-tested statement.

And they want to feel like somebody’s actually saying something. They’re a human being. They’re not like a machine.

And the machines are literally creating a situation where people are like going, “You’re not representing me. Nothing you’re saying sounds remotely like what matters in my life.”

And I think back to when Kamala was talking to the anti-genocide side and she’s like, “I’m speaking” kind of thing. You know, you think back to when Black Lives Matter interrupted Bernie, and the fallout from the Order Before Justice crowd.

And this kind of concept of, “Oh, we can’t talk with them. They’re crass, or they’re just a little bit below my class level,” is a very elitist, what I would consider to be a Democrat framework. So how do you overcome that while we’re talking about democratizing things and so forth?

That kind of prevalent circle-the-wagons approach has created the situation where people have lost faith and have gone after a scumbag like Trump.

It doesn’t take much to see that promises not kept, lies told, focus group-tested messaging, all this stuff really lends to people not having faith in that institution or the people that are carrying the water for it.

And I think that what you’ve been saying has been really powerful because even though I am in no way, shape or form on Team Trump, I do recognize that there’s become such an elitism, the divide between the haves and the have nots, and the veneer of a bourgeois democracy versus an actual real popular democracy. I think a lot of people have eyes wide open on that now. And so who are they to go to?

So I think this is a real opportunity at a local level. Let me just say this, Ben. You said something earlier that I wanted to touch on. I want to bring into this real quick before we get out of here. And that was the Job Guarantee.

I used to jokingly, and not really jokingly, but quite seriously say that the Job Guarantee is like a democracy enhancer.

If you have your local town hall and people are deciding what jobs would be funded by the Job Guarantee, or they’re looking into this stuff, what a great way to bring the whole community into the conversation. Bring people that were normally not involved, suddenly they have an interest in what’s going on in the community.

And you think about something like these Blue Bonds, and all of a sudden, it’s like we’re looking at crowdsourcing our government. I don’t know if that’s really the right way of saying it, but it sort of is.

That’s what you would think in the old traditional sense, that we’re taxing to finance whatever. You have elected representatives to do the bidding of the voters, which doesn’t happen.

But in this case, you all talk about transparency. You talk about making sure that you’re involving the community. These are real, genuine democracy enhancers. You know, I was talking to Chris Shaw the other day. Money, Power and the People.

I mean, this is banking politics of sorts coming into play in this way. I think that there’s a real genuine opportunity to hit people with this.

I’ll give you each a chance to say your final thoughts on what message people need to hear about Blue Bonds and why this should matter. I’ll start with you, Scott, and I’ll let you go out Ben.

Scott Ferguson:
01:02:03

Thanks, Steve. So something that came up in our conversation that we had prior to recording.

We were just getting the lay of the land about what we were going to talk about. I brought up those tricky trick pictures where they can look like two different things.

The most famous one is a drawing of a duck that also, if you look at it a different way, looks like a rabbit. And when you’re looking at it as a duck, you’re looking at these two forms that kind of look like a beak.

But then when you kind of shift your perspective, you realize, “Oh, actually the beak is bunny ears, and so it’s a rabbit.” Right? And what used to look like nothing actually now looks like the bunny’s eye and this sort of thing.

And I guess for us, we’re designing and proposing the Blue Bond, let’s say, understanding all of this as public endogenous money that can be created out of thin air all the time. And we’re looking at as, “What are we going to call that? The duck.”

But we’re putting it out there so it looks like a rabbit and the rabbit is just “Oh yeah, we’re crowdsourcing this fiscal expenditure and it’s your money that’s paying for this.” But really what it’s doing from the duck point of view, it’s just creating a fiscal debt circuit. That’s all it’s doing.

And it’s making credit and it’s making it possible to spend, period. So that’s kind of the strategy here. Yeah, I think that’s primarily what I wanted to say. I guess I’ll also say that what do we do?

We stay nimble, we stay committed. Everybody has a lane, right?

And we’re all in sort of different businesses, different communities and there isn’t one magical trick to make the Democratic Party pay attention. We just keep connecting, trying to open up our networks of collaboration.

Nowadays we hear about all of these previously obscure techno-fascist ass wipes who have these blogs, right? That now it seems like they’re incel masterminding hellscape that was only on their blogs.

Now the President of the United States is trying to make it a reality, right? But 10 years ago, it was just a blog, right? You never know, right? All we can do is keep doing what we’re doing and if we lose, what can I say?

I don’t want to lose.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:16

I’m with you. The Abundance community is waiting to slurp it up, buddy.

Scott Ferguson:
01:04:20

Oh God.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:23

Ben, your thoughts?

Ben Wilson:
01:04:24

Yeah.

I hope that somebody takes up this opportunity to discuss money creation and local investment in a way that excites people that engage in local politics in ways that they hadn’t before.

It opens up an opportunity for people to be more authentic as politicians and to fight for things that they believe in and to come together to build a democracy for the next generation.

I think a new Congress, a new federal level of governance really starts with people doing it at lower levels and doing it successfully and being able to say here’s proof of concept that we don’t need to handicraft every single statement and that we can be authentic and fight for people and we have the power to mobilize the resources to deliver on the types of things that all of us really want, right?

Safe children, well fed, excellent health care, stable housing, public infrastructures to get around, the opportunity to be educated and to come up with new ideas that are sustainable in a real way and not just reproducing the fossil fuel economy with lithium. All of these things need to happen.

And the best we can do is start with our friends and families and communities and talking to people like you, Steve, to get the word out to broader audiences. And yeah, those sorts of things are what we’re going for.

And hopefully we have a state senator in New York that’s like, “This sounds like a good idea,” or in California or wherever else that decides that let’s take a risk and let’s do something for people on [the] planet instead of just advancing these narrow political goals that currently exist.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:13

That’s fantastic. Both of you guys. Well said. I really appreciate you. For me, some of these subjects I don’t focus on nearly enough.

And then when I get a chance to sit down with you guys who take me outside of my comfort zone at times, I mean, it’s really good. I don’t like being stuck. I don’t want to get. How did you say it? Routines, right?

These routines can really create a rut that’s impossible to get out of. And until you smash the side of the rut and start paving a new path… it’s really nice to talk to you guys. I really do appreciate it.

These proposals and stuff, we will have them in our show notes, folks, so please go into the extras. We obviously provide curated transcripts and stuff, so you’ll be able to find the links to all these conversations in the show notes.

But go to moneyontheleft.org and you’ll be able to see it right on top. You look for Blue Bond and Fiscal Strategy for overcoming Trump 2.0 and read all about it. Gentlemen, I really appreciate your time here.

Is there anything else you guys like to bring up for people to go look for? Any work that you guys are interested in promoting that we can give everyone awareness of?

Ben Wilson:
01:07:21

I was super blessed recently to visit Morehouse College. Scott was there too. The work of Andrew Douglas and his students.

They ran a UNI currency project that he called the CREDO and there’s some interviews available on Money on the Left.

Really inspirational work by those students and conversations that if you’re feeling down about democracy and money creation and the state of the world. Right? Nothing is more uplifting than students really pushing boundaries and being creative and doing really good work in their communities.

Steve Grumbine:
01:07:54

Very much appreciate that thought. Scott, any thoughts and then we’ll go ahead and close out.

Scott Ferguson:
01:07:59

I think what this process has taught me is that there is a profound terror when it comes to debt and it actually extends into the heterodox economics, MMT and law community. I’m not calling out any names, but I will say that we have been very frustrated with trying to work on this proposal and get it published somewhere.

We started working probably in earnest in February, and we started sending out various versions of this proposal to every publication from the most milquetoast centrist lib publication to radical leftist publications. And we’ve been just denied and blocked. And these folks are just running for the hills.

We definitely have had some great partners and learned and collaborated with them as part of this process. So I don’t want to say that we’re just embattled alone. We’re not alone, but there’s been some gatekeeping even close to home. And to me, I don’t know.

On the one hand, I’m not surprised. On the other hand, part of me is still shocked.

We are so terrified of public debt and public debt at the state level that we can’t imagine whether we’re milquetoast libs or we’re radical leftists. We can’t imagine mobilizing it to fight fascism. And that’s horrible. I don’t know. This has really changed me.

It makes me want to really dig into that issue and make the case for getting over it. MMT101 and Stephanie Kelton have done a great job at trying to assuage our fears about Uncle Sam’s supposed empty pockets and the like.

But I think there’s a bigger battle here that needs to be dealt with. And yeah, I’m ready to fight it.

Steve Grumbine:
01:09:48

I’m with you, bro. I hear you, man. All right, folks, this was fantastic. I really enjoyed talking to you, Ben, and you, Scott, and it’s been way too long.

Hopefully we can have you back far more regular than it’s been. And I’m going to take it on the chin with that one, man.

I really like the fact that you guys are really thinking out of the box here, and I’d like to be more guilty of that because I do think that we’ve done some really interesting work of late.

Virginia and myself were able to get on Proles Pod, which these guys are straight up Marxist-Leninist Communists, and they got to hear an MMT story maybe for the first time. And at first I think they didn’t think they were going to hear much.

And then by the end of it, they were like, “Wow, this was a really powerful interview.”

Scott Ferguson:
01:10:28

That’s great.

Steve Grumbine:
01:10:29

And so we’ve talked to some people outside of this kind of narrow scope that we tend to deal with, and we’re not backing away from MMT. We’re just trying to find a way to say things to people that otherwise just push back. And we found some successes.

I wouldn’t say that we’re like rolling around in success. I would say that it’s very fleeting, but I would say that it was encouraging enough that we keep moving forward.

And I think that’s the key because this podcast alone, you all are in the 330s.

I don’t know what episode number this will be by the time we release, but we’ve released over 330 episodes and we’ve never missed a week since we started. We have put out an episode every single week for six years.

Scott Ferguson:
01:11:13

That is so much work.

Steve Grumbine:
01:11:15

It really is. And every one of them is edited with show notes and with transcripts. And we’re begging people share our podcast. Please share it.

They’re like, “No, we’re not gonna share it.” No, it’s a lot of work and. But it’s moments like this where I learned something new and I feel empowered now to break out of my rut.

And so I thank you guys for that. I really. Anyway, with that, folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the founder of Real Progressives and the host of Macro N Cheese.

And as you just heard, we’ve been going strong every week for six years now. And within that space, we have really tried hard to produce value.

We are a 501(c)3 not for profit, so we tend to stay away from purely political subjects and we don’t do campaigns and we try not to talk to folks that are in that space. But we do try to inform you of the world around you in the best way we know how. Are we always right? Are we always right? No, we’re doing our best. Right? But within that, we feel like we’re doing good work.

And if you agree that we’re doing good work and you believe that the effort should be supported, we welcome your support. Again, all donations are tax deductible. Please consider. You can go to patreon.com/real progressives.

You can go to our Substack which is lightly attended, but we love for you to come and make that not a thing anymore. There you can support us as well. And also on our website, realprogressives.org. Please feel free to go to the dropdown and click donate.

We are never going to turn you away and you are always free to write it off on your taxes as long as nonprofits are tax deductible and we are still tax deductible. So please consider becoming a monthly donor. No amount is too small. No amount is too great.

And with that, on behalf of myself and my guests, Ben Wilson and Scott Ferguson, Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:13:18

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.